Badi Behenji is watching you

Step out of Lucknow’s Amausi airport and you are greeted by giant hoardings proclaiming Mayawati’s achievements with Behenji smiling benignly from them. Leave the airport and drive into the city, and you’ll be haunted by them at every street corner there is.

We had come to Lucknow for a leisurely break. An unlikely destination for one, for sure, as people kept reminding me. “Lucknow?! On a holiday?” We were prepared to stay put in our hotel and just enjoy our time together. But Lucknow surprised us, and pleasantly.

I looked around for hints of the city’s famed tehzeeb. But other than being called ‘janaab’ instead of ‘sahab’ by autorickshaw drivers, shop salesmen and sundry others, I didn’t find much of it.

We avoided Mayawati’s grand parks with elephants that cost a crore each to sculpt and her handbags immortalised in stone (“I refuse to see such a colossal waste of public money,” as the wife put it), and instead opted to visit Lucknow’s heritage.

Amid the ruins of the Residency, where the mutineers of 1857 laid seige, we found ourselves invading the privacy of numerous amorous couples. We bid a hasty retreat to the Bada Imambara where guides are trained to parrot out the same old information while giving it a fresh new twist. So we encountered medieval age ‘CCTV cameras’ and other modern-day security features.

All this while, Lucknow’s autorickshaw drivers made sure they had a good Diwali at our expense. I’d always thought the biggest rogues in India were Chennai’s auto-walas, but Lucknow’s, I discovered, beat them by a fair distance. The Lucknow autorickshaw driver only counts in multiples of 50. He knows no other numbers.

At Hazratganj, Lucknow’s colonial shopping district, there seems to be a law that all signage on heritage buildings have to be white on a black background. It was quite interesting to see the all-too-familiar Airtel and Vodafone logos shorn of their brand colours. If you are a brand manager with one of them, don’t visit Hazratganj. You’ll have the worst nightmare of your life.

I couldn’t take a picture of it, but here’s a photo I found at http://sites.google.com/site/lovelylucknow/hazratganj_lucknow that will give you an idea of what to expect.